What Does Mike Pompeo, Nominee for CIA Director, Mean for Civil Liberties?

Donald Trump has nominated Mike Pompeo to be Director of the CIA. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee will be January 11. Pompeo supports torture, wants to expand unwarranted mass surveillance, approves of the prison at Guantanamo, and has said Snowden deserves the death penalty. We strongly oppose the nomination, and urge you to call your Senator to tell them to oppose his confirmation:

Take Action: Call Your Senators, tell them to oppose the confirmation of Mike Pompeo as CIA Director. Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to your Senator’s office (you will need to call twice to reach each of your Senators).

Mike Pompeo, in his own words:

Torture

Pompeo has doggedly opposed the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture report. In a 2014 press release, Pompeo declared “These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots.”

Guantanamo

Pompeo has fought to keep Gitmo open, and, although it isn’t true, Pompeo has alleged that “GTMO has been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism.” Despite the lack of charges, indefinite detention, and horrible conditions that led prisoners to stage a prolonged hunger strike, which then resulted in gruesome, cruel, inhumane, and torturous force-feeding… Pompeo found on a trip to Gitmo that all was just fine, “The detainees at GTMO are treated exceptionally well – so well that some have even declined to be resettled, instead choosing to stay at GTMO.”

NSA Spying

Pompeo opposed the modest reforms to the NSA’s metadata collection program that was the USA Freedom Act, and last January said he “wants the nation’s spies to get back their access to mass surveillance data.” In fact, he wants to expand the program! He told McClatchy that “he wants the National Security Agency to be able to restart its bulk collection of metadata and combine those records with even more information: financial and “lifestyle” details that would be accessible in a huge, searchable database.”

Ed Snowden

In February 2016, he told CNN that Snowden “should be brought back from Russia and given due process and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence for having put friends of mine, friends of yours, who serve in the military today at enormous risk because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers.”

Muslims and the War on Terror

Pompeo has said that “Islamic jihad … threatens every Kansan and every American.” He frames the War on Terror as a war between the West and radical Islam, and has said that failure of any Muslim leader to speak out against Islamic extremism makes them “complicit in these acts and more importantly still, in those that may well follow.”

This model resolution offers an opportunity for municipalities and states to call on the federal government to pursue transparency and accountability through an independent commission and prosecution of all government officials complicit in torture.